Web Scraping

November 4 + 6, 2024

Jo Hardin

Agenda 11/4/24

  1. web scraping
  2. selector gadget
  3. rvest

Important tool

Our approach to web scraping relies on the Chrome browser and an extension called a Selector Gadget. Download them here:

Data Acquisition

Based on https://www.effectivedatastorytelling.com/post/a-deeper-dive-into-lego-bricks-and-data-stories, original source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/instructors/bill-shander

Reading The Student Life

How often do you read The Student Life?
a. Every day
b. 3-5 times a week
c. Once a week
d. Rarely

Reading The Student Life

What do you think is the most common word in the titles of The Student Life opinion pieces?

Analyzing The Student Life

Reading The Student Life

How do you think the sentiments in opinion pieces in The Student Life compare across authors?
Roughly the same?
Wildly different?
Somewhere in between?

Analyzing The Student Life

All of this analysis is done in R!

(mostly) with tools you already know!

Common words in The Student Life titles

Code for the earlier plot:

data(stop_words)  # from tidytext
tsl_opinion_titles |>
  tidytext::unnest_tokens(word, title) |>
  anti_join(stop_words) |>
  count(word, sort = TRUE) |>
  slice_head(n = 20) |>
  mutate(word = fct_reorder(word, n)) |>
  ggplot(aes(y = word, x = n, fill = log(n))) +
  geom_col(show.legend = FALSE) +
  theme_minimal(base_size = 16) +
  labs(
    x = "Number of mentions",
    y = "Word",
    title = "The Student Life - Opinion pieces",
    subtitle = "Common words in the 500 most recent opinion pieces",
    caption = "Source: Data scraped from The Student Life on Nov 4, 2024"
  ) +
  theme(
    plot.title.position = "plot",
    plot.caption = element_text(color = "gray30")
  )

Avg sentiment scores of first paragraph

Code for the earlier plot:

afinn_sentiments <- get_sentiments("afinn")  # need tidytext and textdata
tsl_opinion_titles |>
  tidytext::unnest_tokens(word, first_p) |>
  anti_join(stop_words) |>
  left_join(afinn_sentiments) |> 
  group_by(authors, title) |>
  summarize(total_sentiment = sum(value, na.rm = TRUE), .groups = "drop") |>
  group_by(authors) |>
  summarize(
    n_articles = n(),
    avg_sentiment = mean(total_sentiment, na.rm = TRUE),
  ) |>
  filter(n_articles > 1 & !is.na(authors)) |>
  arrange(desc(avg_sentiment)) |>
  slice(c(1:10, 69:78)) |>
  mutate(
    authors = fct_reorder(authors, avg_sentiment),
    neg_pos = if_else(avg_sentiment < 0, "neg", "pos"),
    label_position = if_else(neg_pos == "neg", 0.25, -0.25)
  ) |>
  ggplot(aes(y = authors, x = avg_sentiment)) +
  geom_col(aes(fill = neg_pos), show.legend = FALSE) +
  geom_text(
    aes(x = label_position, label = authors, color = neg_pos),
    hjust = c(rep(1,10), rep(0, 10)),
    show.legend = FALSE,
    fontface = "bold"
  ) +
  geom_text(
    aes(label = round(avg_sentiment, 1)),
    hjust = c(rep(1.25,10), rep(-0.25, 10)),
    color = "white",
    fontface = "bold"
  ) +
  scale_fill_manual(values = c("neg" = "#4d4009", "pos" = "#FF4B91")) +
  scale_color_manual(values = c("neg" = "#4d4009", "pos" = "#FF4B91")) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = -5:5, minor_breaks = NULL) +
  scale_y_discrete(breaks = NULL) +
  coord_cartesian(xlim = c(-5, 5)) +
  labs(
    x = "negative  ←     Average sentiment score (AFINN)     →  positive",
    y = NULL,
    title = "The Student Life - Opinion pieces\nAverage sentiment scores of first paragraph by author",
    subtitle = "Top 10 average positive and negative scores",
    caption = "Source: Data scraped from The Student Life on Nov 4, 2024"
  ) +
  theme_void(base_size = 16) +
  theme(
    plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0.5),
    plot.subtitle = element_text(hjust = 0.5, margin = unit(c(0.5, 0, 1, 0), "lines")),
    axis.text.y = element_blank(),
    plot.caption = element_text(color = "gray30")
  )

Where is the data coming from?

https://tsl.news/category/opinions/

Where is the data coming from?

tsl_opinion_titles
# A tibble: 500 × 4
   title                                     authors date                first_p
   <chr>                                     <chr>   <dttm>              <chr>  
 1 Elon Musk’s million-dollar-a-day rewards… Celest… 2024-11-01 16:27:00 have y…
 2 The politics behind apolitical acts       Eric Lu 2024-11-01 16:21:00 while …
 3 In Defense of the Pomona College Judicia… Henri … 2024-11-01 16:15:00 former…
 4 ‘Yakking’ isn’t a canon event, party res… Kabir … 2024-11-01 16:10:00 whirri…
 5 The ‘if he wanted to, he would’ mentalit… Tess M… 2024-11-01 16:01:00 ladies…
 6 You can’t silence us: A united front aga… Outbac… 2024-10-25 11:23:00 in the…
 7 We will not tolerate collective punishme… Suspen… 2024-10-25 09:04:00 in the…
 8 A guide to ballot propositions            Akshay… 2024-10-25 06:37:00 are yo…
 9 Pomona will protest or perish             Maggie… 2024-10-23 06:00:00 as pom…
10 GUEST EDITORIAL: Pomona’s culpability un… Mike W… 2024-10-11 08:23:00 mike w…
# ℹ 490 more rows

Web scraping

Scraping the web: what? why?

  • Increasing amount of data is available on the web

  • These data are provided in an unstructured format: you can always copy & paste, but it’s time-consuming and prone to errors

  • Web scraping is the process of extracting this information automatically and transform it into a structured dataset

  • Two different scenarios:

    • Screen scraping: extract data from source code of website, with html parser (easy) or regular expression matching (less easy).

    • Web APIs (application programming interface): website offers a set of structured http requests that return JSON or XML files.

Hypertext Markup Language

Most of the data on the web is largely available as HTML - while it is structured (hierarchical) it often is not available in a form useful for analysis (flat / tidy).

<html>
  <head>
    <title>This is a title</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p align="center">Hello world!</p>
    <br/>
    <div class="name" id="first">John</div>
    <div class="name" id="last">Doe</div>
    <div class="contact">
      <div class="home">555-555-1234</div>
      <div class="home">555-555-2345</div>
      <div class="work">555-555-9999</div>
      <div class="fax">555-555-8888</div>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Some HTML elements

  • <html>: start of the HTML page
  • <head>: header information (metadata about the page)
  • <body>: everything that is on the page
  • <p>: paragraphs
  • <b>: bold
  • <table>: table
  • <div>: a container to group content together

rvest

  • The rvest package makes basic processing and manipulation of HTML data straight forward
  • It is designed to work with pipelines built with |>
  • rvest.tidyverse.org
library(rvest)

rvest hex logo

rvest

Core functions:

  • read_html() - read HTML data from a url or character string.

  • html_elements() - select specified elements from the HTML document using CSS selectors.

  • html_element() - select a single element from the HTML document using CSS selectors.

  • html_table() - parse an HTML table into a data frame.

  • html_text() / html_text2() - extract element’s text content.

  • html_name - extract a element’s name(s).

  • html_attrs - extract all attributes.

  • html_attr - extract attribute value(s) by name.

html, rvest, & xml2

html <- 
'<html>
  <head>
    <title>This is a title</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p align="center">Hello world!</p>
    <br/>
    <div class="name" id="first">John</div>
    <div class="name" id="last">Doe</div>
    <div class="contact">
      <div class="home">555-555-1234</div>
      <div class="home">555-555-2345</div>
      <div class="work">555-555-9999</div>
      <div class="fax">555-555-8888</div>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>'
read_html(html)
{html_document}
<html>
[1] <head>\n<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8 ...
[2] <body>\n    <p align="center">Hello world!</p>\n    <br><div class="name" ...

Selecting elements

read_html(html) |> html_elements("p")
{xml_nodeset (1)}
[1] <p align="center">Hello world!</p>
read_html(html) |> html_elements("p") |> html_text()
[1] "Hello world!"
read_html(html) |> html_elements("p") |> html_name()
[1] "p"
read_html(html) |> html_elements("p") |> html_attrs()
[[1]]
   align 
"center" 
read_html(html) |> html_elements("p") |> html_attr("align")
[1] "center"

More selecting elements

read_html(html) |> html_elements("div")
{xml_nodeset (7)}
[1] <div class="name" id="first">John</div>
[2] <div class="name" id="last">Doe</div>
[3] <div class="contact">\n      <div class="home">555-555-1234</div>\n       ...
[4] <div class="home">555-555-1234</div>
[5] <div class="home">555-555-2345</div>
[6] <div class="work">555-555-9999</div>
[7] <div class="fax">555-555-8888</div>
read_html(html) |> html_elements("div") |> html_text()
[1] "John"                                                                                  
[2] "Doe"                                                                                   
[3] "\n      555-555-1234\n      555-555-2345\n      555-555-9999\n      555-555-8888\n    "
[4] "555-555-1234"                                                                          
[5] "555-555-2345"                                                                          
[6] "555-555-9999"                                                                          
[7] "555-555-8888"

CSS selectors

  • We will use a tool called SelectorGadget to help us identify the HTML elements of interest by constructing a CSS selector which can be used to subset the HTML document.
  • Some examples of basic selector syntax is below,
Selector Example Description
.class .title Select all elements with class=“title”
#id #name Select all elements with id=“name”
element p Select all <p> elements
element element div p Select all <p> elements inside a <div> element
element>element div > p Select all <p> elements with <div> as a direct parent
[attribute] [class] Select all elements with a class attribute
[attribute=value] [class=title] Select all elements with class=“title”

CSS classes and ids

  • class and id are used to style elements (e.g., change their color!). They are special types of attributes.

  • class can be applied to multiple different elements (class is identified with ., for example .name)

  • id is unique to each element (id is identified with #, for example, #first)

read_html(html) |> html_elements(".name")
{xml_nodeset (2)}
[1] <div class="name" id="first">John</div>
[2] <div class="name" id="last">Doe</div>
read_html(html) |> html_elements("div.name")
{xml_nodeset (2)}
[1] <div class="name" id="first">John</div>
[2] <div class="name" id="last">Doe</div>
read_html(html) |> html_elements("#first")
{xml_nodeset (1)}
[1] <div class="name" id="first">John</div>

Text with html_text() vs. html_text2()

html = read_html(
  "<p>  
    This is the first sentence in the paragraph.
    This is the second sentence that should be on the same line as the first sentence.<br>This third sentence should start on a new line.
  </p>"
)
html |> html_text()
[1] "  \n    This is the first sentence in the paragraph.\n    This is the second sentence that should be on the same line as the first sentence.This third sentence should start on a new line.\n  "
html |> html_text2()
[1] "This is the first sentence in the paragraph. This is the second sentence that should be on the same line as the first sentence.\nThis third sentence should start on a new line."

HTML tables with html_table()

html_table = 
'<html>
  <head>
    <title>This is a title</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <table>
      <tr> <th>a</th> <th>b</th> <th>c</th> </tr>
      <tr> <td>1</td> <td>2</td> <td>3</td> </tr>
      <tr> <td>2</td> <td>3</td> <td>4</td> </tr>
      <tr> <td>3</td> <td>4</td> <td>5</td> </tr>
    </table>
  </body>
</html>'
read_html(html_table) |>
  html_elements("table") |> 
  html_table()
[[1]]
# A tibble: 3 × 3
      a     b     c
  <int> <int> <int>
1     1     2     3
2     2     3     4
3     3     4     5

div p vs div > p

  • div p selects all <p> elements within <div>, regardless of depth.
  • div > p selects only direct child <p> elements of <div>.
<div>
  <p>This will be selected by both `div p` and `div > p`.</p> 
  <section>
    <p>This will be selected only by `div p`, not by `div > p`.</p>
  </section>
</div>

SelectorGadget

SelectorGadget (selectorgadget.com) is a javascript based tool that helps you interactively build an appropriate CSS selector for the content you are interested in.

Recap

  • Use the SelectorGadget identify elements you want to grab
  • Use the rvest R package to first read in the entire page (into R) and then parse the object you’ve read in to the elements you’re interested in
  • Put the components together in a data frame (a tibble) and analyze it like you analyze any other data

Plan

  1. Read in the entire page
  2. Scrape opinion title and save as title
  3. Scrape author and save as author
  4. Scrape date and save as date
  5. Create a new data frame called tsl_opinion with variables title, author, and date

Read in the entire page

tsl_page <- read_html("https://tsl.news/category/opinions/")
tsl_page
{html_document}
<html lang="en-US">
[1] <head>\n<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8 ...
[2] <body class="archive category category-opinions category-2244 custom-back ...
typeof(tsl_page)
[1] "list"
class(tsl_page)
[1] "xml_document" "xml_node"
  • we need to convert into something more familiar, like a data frame

Scrape title and save as title

tsl_page |> 
html_elements(".entry-title a") 
{xml_nodeset (10)}
 [1] <a href="https://tsl.news/opinion-elon-musks-million-dollar-a-day-reward ...
 [2] <a href="https://tsl.news/opinion-the-politics-behind-apolitical-acts/"  ...
 [3] <a href="https://tsl.news/opinion-in-defense-of-the-pomona-college-judic ...
 [4] <a href="https://tsl.news/yakking-isnt-a-cannon-event/" title="OPINION:  ...
 [5] <a href="https://tsl.news/opinion-the-if-he-wanted-to-he-would-mentality ...
 [6] <a href="https://tsl.news/you-cant-silence-us-a-united-front-against-pom ...
 [7] <a href="https://tsl.news/suspended-students-speak-out/" title="OPINION: ...
 [8] <a href="https://tsl.news/opinion-a-guide-to-ballot-propositions/" title ...
 [9] <a href="https://tsl.news/opinion-pomona-will-protest-or-perish/" title= ...
[10] <a href="https://tsl.news/guest-editorial-pomonas-culpability-under-inte ...
title <- tsl_page |> 
html_elements(".entry-title a") |> 
html_text()
title
 [1] "OPINION: Elon Musk’s million-dollar-a-day rewards are undemocratic"               
 [2] "OPINION: The politics behind apolitical acts"                                     
 [3] "OPINION: In Defense of the Pomona College Judicial Council"                       
 [4] "OPINION: ‘Yakking’ isn’t a canon event, party responsibly"                        
 [5] "OPINION: The ‘if he wanted to, he would’ mentality is holding women back"         
 [6] "You can’t silence us: A united front against Pomona’s repression"                 
 [7] "OPINION: We will not tolerate collective punishment: Suspended students speak out"
 [8] "OPINION: A guide to ballot propositions"                                          
 [9] "OPINION: Pomona will protest or perish"                                           
[10] "GUEST EDITORIAL: Pomona’s culpability under International Humanitarian Law"       
title <- title |> 
str_remove("OPINION: ")

title
 [1] "Elon Musk’s million-dollar-a-day rewards are undemocratic"                 
 [2] "The politics behind apolitical acts"                                       
 [3] "In Defense of the Pomona College Judicial Council"                         
 [4] "‘Yakking’ isn’t a canon event, party responsibly"                          
 [5] "The ‘if he wanted to, he would’ mentality is holding women back"           
 [6] "You can’t silence us: A united front against Pomona’s repression"          
 [7] "We will not tolerate collective punishment: Suspended students speak out"  
 [8] "A guide to ballot propositions"                                            
 [9] "Pomona will protest or perish"                                             
[10] "GUEST EDITORIAL: Pomona’s culpability under International Humanitarian Law"

Scrape author and save as author

author <- tsl_page |> 
html_elements(".author") |> 
html_text()
author
 [1] "By Celeste Cariker"                                                     
 [2] "Celeste Cariker"                                                        
 [3] "By Eric Lu"                                                             
 [4] "Eric Lu"                                                                
 [5] "By Henri Prevost"                                                       
 [6] "Henri Prevost"                                                          
 [7] "By Kabir Raina"                                                         
 [8] "Kabir Raina"                                                            
 [9] "By Tess McHugh"                                                         
[10] "Tess McHugh"                                                            
[11] "By Outback Editors, Undercurrents Editors and The Scripps Voice Editors"
[12] "Outback Editors"                                                        
[13] "Undercurrents Editors"                                                  
[14] "The Scripps Voice Editors"                                              
[15] "By Suspended Students"                                                  
[16] "Suspended Students"                                                     
[17] "By Akshay Seetharam"                                                    
[18] "Akshay Seetharam"                                                       
[19] "By Maggie Zhang"                                                        
[20] "Maggie Zhang"                                                           
[21] "By Mike Withey"                                                         
[22] "Mike Withey"                                                            
author <- tsl_page |> 
html_elements(".author") |> 
html_text() |> 
tibble() |> 
set_names(nm = "authors") |> 
filter(str_detect(authors, "By "))
author 
# A tibble: 10 × 1
   authors                                                                
   <chr>                                                                  
 1 By Celeste Cariker                                                     
 2 By Eric Lu                                                             
 3 By Henri Prevost                                                       
 4 By Kabir Raina                                                         
 5 By Tess McHugh                                                         
 6 By Outback Editors, Undercurrents Editors and The Scripps Voice Editors
 7 By Suspended Students                                                  
 8 By Akshay Seetharam                                                    
 9 By Maggie Zhang                                                        
10 By Mike Withey                                                         
author <- author |> 
mutate(authors = str_replace(authors, "By ", "")) 

author
# A tibble: 10 × 1
   authors                                                             
   <chr>                                                               
 1 Celeste Cariker                                                     
 2 Eric Lu                                                             
 3 Henri Prevost                                                       
 4 Kabir Raina                                                         
 5 Tess McHugh                                                         
 6 Outback Editors, Undercurrents Editors and The Scripps Voice Editors
 7 Suspended Students                                                  
 8 Akshay Seetharam                                                    
 9 Maggie Zhang                                                        
10 Mike Withey

Scrape date and save as date

date <- tsl_page |> 
html_elements(".published") |> 
html_text()
date
 [1] "November 1, 2024 9:27 am"  "November 1, 2024 9:21 am" 
 [3] "November 1, 2024 9:15 am"  "November 1, 2024 9:10 am" 
 [5] "November 1, 2024 9:01 am"  "October 25, 2024 4:23 am" 
 [7] "October 25, 2024 2:04 am"  "October 24, 2024 11:37 pm"
 [9] "October 22, 2024 11:00 pm" "October 11, 2024 1:23 am" 
date <- date |> 
lubridate::mdy_hm(tz = "America/Los_Angeles")
date
 [1] "2024-11-01 09:27:00 PDT" "2024-11-01 09:21:00 PDT"
 [3] "2024-11-01 09:15:00 PDT" "2024-11-01 09:10:00 PDT"
 [5] "2024-11-01 09:01:00 PDT" "2024-10-25 04:23:00 PDT"
 [7] "2024-10-25 02:04:00 PDT" "2024-10-24 23:37:00 PDT"
 [9] "2024-10-22 23:00:00 PDT" "2024-10-11 01:23:00 PDT"

Create a new data frame

tsl_opinion <- tibble(
    title,
    author,
    date
)

tsl_opinion
# A tibble: 10 × 3
   title                                             authors date               
   <chr>                                             <chr>   <dttm>             
 1 Elon Musk’s million-dollar-a-day rewards are und… Celest… 2024-11-01 09:27:00
 2 The politics behind apolitical acts               Eric Lu 2024-11-01 09:21:00
 3 In Defense of the Pomona College Judicial Council Henri … 2024-11-01 09:15:00
 4 ‘Yakking’ isn’t a canon event, party responsibly  Kabir … 2024-11-01 09:10:00
 5 The ‘if he wanted to, he would’ mentality is hol… Tess M… 2024-11-01 09:01:00
 6 You can’t silence us: A united front against Pom… Outbac… 2024-10-25 04:23:00
 7 We will not tolerate collective punishment: Susp… Suspen… 2024-10-25 02:04:00
 8 A guide to ballot propositions                    Akshay… 2024-10-24 23:37:00
 9 Pomona will protest or perish                     Maggie… 2024-10-22 23:00:00
10 GUEST EDITORIAL: Pomona’s culpability under Inte… Mike W… 2024-10-11 01:23:00

Opinion titles

#|eval: false
tsl_opinions <- function(i){
tsl_page <- read_html(paste0("https://tsl.news/category/opinions/page/",i))
  
title <- tsl_page |> 
html_elements(".entry-title a") |> 
html_text() |> 
str_remove("OPINION: ")
  
author <- tsl_page |> 
html_elements(".author") |> 
html_text() |> 
tibble() |> 
set_names(nm = "authors") |> 
filter(str_detect(authors, "By ")) |> 
mutate(authors = str_replace(authors, "By ", "")) 
  
date <- tsl_page |> 
html_elements(".published") |> 
html_text() |> 
lubridate::mdy_hm(tz = "America/Los_Angeles")

first_p <- tsl_page |> 
  html_elements(".entry-content p") |> 
  html_text() |> 
  tolower()
  
tibble(
    title,
    author,
    date,
    first_p
)  
}

tsl_opinion_titles <- 1:50 |> purrr::map(tsl_opinions) |> 
list_rbind()

Web scraping considerations

Check if you are allowed!

library(robotstxt)
paths_allowed("https://tsl.news/category/opinions/")
[1] TRUE
paths_allowed("http://www.facebook.com")
[1] FALSE

Ethics: “Can you?” vs “Should you?”

“Can you?” vs “Should you?”

Challenges: Unreliable formatting

Challenges: Data broken into many pages